The Code that Failed: Testing a
Bacon-Shakespeare Cipher

by Terry Ross

Although the most popular current strain of antistratfordianism is
Oxfordian, for many decades Francis Bacon was the favorite candidate
of those who doubted that William Shakespeare wrote the works attributed
to him. Many of the objections Oxfordians raise against Shakespeare were
developed originally by Baconians (something Oxfordians are not always
eager to admit), and Baconians had the advantage over Oxfordians that
their candidate had lived long enough not only to write the works but
indeed, they claim, to have overseen the publishing of the First Folio in
1623: Oxford died in 1604, Shakespeare in 1616, but Bacon lived until
1626.

Since so many of the same points are raised by both Baconians and
Oxfordians, the case for Shakespeare is ably presented elsewhere on
the Shakespeare Authorship page. One major
difference between the Oxfordians and the Baconians is that the latter are
much more likely to display a fondness for cryptography. There have been
many ingenious, complicated (and sometimes nutty) efforts to show that
Bacon hid the evidence of his authorship within the works themselves, in
code or cipher. The most comprehensive response to these efforts is The
Shakespeare Ciphers Examined (1957), by William F. and Elizebeth S.
Friedman, which is thought to have pretty much demolished cryptographical
claims for Bacon.

The temptation to find new Baconian ciphers is a powerful one, however,
and Penn Leary, who greatly admires the Friedmans and who is determined to
avoid the errors that they found in earlier Baconian works, believes that
he has uncovered the actual cipher Bacon used to sign "Shakespeare's"
works. He explains his methods in great detail in The Cryptographic
Shakespeare [1987]; much of this work is available online at the Penn Leary site.
I decided to test Leary's methods for myself, and in this essay I will
explain his methods, and I will give the results of my tests--results
that completely invalidate those methods.

The principal cipher Bacon used, according to Leary, is based on a
21-letter alphabet: "ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVY." This alphabet omits the
letters "JUWXZ," but, as Leary explains, in Elizabethan times the letters
"I" and "J" were often used interchangeably, as were the letters "U" and
"V," and "W" was often printed as "VV." Since the Roman alphabet did not
use "X" and "Z," Bacon, according to Leary, omitted those letters. In
addition, the numerals from "1" to "9" could be expressed as the letters
from "A" to "K" (remember, there is no "J" in this alphabet), while the
numeral "0" may be omitted, since the Romans had no zero. Given this
21-letter alphabet, Leary believes Bacon then replaced each letter with
the one that comes four places later. Thus "A" becomes "E," "B" becomes
"F," and so on. Here is the 21-letter alphabet, and beneath it in
lowercase is the cipher equivalent of each letter.

ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVY
efghiklmnopqrstvyabcd

Here is a string of letters one might find in Shakespeare's works:
"TSVAI." Applying Penn Leary's methods to this string produces "bacen."
Remembering that spelling had not yet become standardized in Bacon's day
(there are dozens of ways to spell
"Shakespeare"), one might well be inclined to count "bacen" as a
spelling of "bacon." Penn Leary has found a great many such Baconian
signatures in Shakespeare's works--as of 1989 there were 113, and I'm sure
the number must be significantly larger by now. Leary has also found
instances in cipher of the word "name" and of something resembling the
word "cipher" itself, and he does not confine himself strictly to the
method I have described, but since the overwhelming majority of his
findings is based on his application of those methods to find what he
believes is Bacon's hidden name, my analysis is confined to his search for
"Bacon," though a similar analysis could easily be applied to "name" or
"cipher."

I decided to apply Penn Leary's methods to the Funeral Elegy that has recently been
attributed to
Shakespeare, but that has not, to my knowledge, been subjected to a search
for ciphers. If the Funeral Elegy was indeed written by the author
of
Shakespeare's works, and if Francis Bacon wrote those works and "signed"
them by incorporating ciphers of his name, we should expect to find such
ciphers hidden in the Funeral Elegy. On the other hand, if we
failed to
find such signatures, then perhaps the Funeral Elegy was not
written by
the author of The Tempest and Coriolanus.

Sure enough, Penn Leary's Baconian cipher identifies the Funeral
Elegy as a genuine work by Shakespeare (that is to say, Bacon). I will
quote the English version of the lines in which I have found these
ciphers, and immediately beneath I will quote the lines as they appear
when translated according to Penn Leary's Baconian rules (I call the
result "Bakish" for short):

The letters "isemust" translate into "naiqcab," which is backwards for
"bacqian," which also counts as "bacon."

Penn Leary has also found Bacon's name by looking at the first letter of
each line, or of each capitalized word, or at every other letter in a
string, but I confined myself to simple backwards and forwards searches
and still found that Francis Bacon seems to have proclaimed his authorship
of the Funeral Elegy no fewer than seven times:

3 times forwards (baqiyn, baeqin, becen)

4 times backwards (bekan, bekan, bacan, bacqian)

A Baconian might well take this as compelling evidence that the author of
the Funeral Elegy was also the author of Shakespeare's works--and
that the
author's real name was Francis Bacon.

Penn Leary's method found seven instances of Bacon's "signature" in the
Funeral Elegy, but the reason for this is not that Bacon wrote the
poem
but that Leary's method is guaranteed to find Bacon's "signature" in
virtually every text of any length in the Roman alphabet. What makes this
phenomenon possible is the enormous number of character strings that count
as an instance of the name "Bacon."

Below are three lines of characters. In the top line are the 26
letters and 10 numerals used in English; in the middle line is the
transformation of those 36 characters into the 21-letter alphabet Leary
thinks Bacon used; and in the bottom line are the equivalent letters as
they would appear in the cipher that Leary thinks Bacon used (what I call
"Bakish").

Penn Leary's method is to translate English into Bakish and then look for
the string "bacon" or its equivalent. Now, Leary's man had a very short
name, and it should always be easier to find strings of letters that
correspond to "bacon" than, say, to "McGillicuddy" or "Shakespeare," but
Leary makes things even easier for himself by allowing a great many
equivalents for "bacon."

How many ways are there to spell "bacon"? Consider first just the
consonants "bcn." In Leary's cipher method, the English letter "T"
becomes the Bakish "b." I have counted 14 ways used by Leary to spell the
Bakish "c" (though no doubt there are more than 14 that he would accept),
because Leary allows any Bakish letter or string of letters that may have
a hard "c" or "k" sound: "c" in Bakish = "U," "V," or "W" in English;
"ch"="UD," "VD," or "WD"; "k"="F"; "q"="M." The Bakish "n" occurs
whenever "I" or "J" occurs in English. Thus with 1 way to get "t," 14
ways for "c," and 2 ways for "n," there are 28 different English
combinations of letters that produce the Bakish consonants in "bacon"
forwards, and another 28 ways backwards.

But the real trick is in the spelling of the "a" and "o." As Leary
says, "for the spelling of 'Bacon' in deciphered plaintext [i.e., Bakish],
conceivably almost any vowel or combination of vowels might be substituted
for the 'a' and the 'o' in Bacon's name" (Leary, p. 217). If we allow
all 6 vowels (Bakish "aeiouy" = English "SAEKQR") but also allow any two
or three consecutive vowels, as Leary does, then there are 258 different
ways just to spell the "a" and 258 different ways to spell the "o" in
Bacon. With the 28 different ways to spell the consonants, there are now
1,863,792 (28 times 258 times 258) different ways in English to generate
the Bakish "bacon" forwards and another 1,863,792 ways backwards. Thus,
there are a total of 3,727,584 strings of characters that will count as
ciphers for "bacon." While it's true that Elizabethan spelling was
somewhat variable, it wasn't THAT variable.

We may look for any of these 3,727,584 magic strings in consecutive
letters in Shakespeare's works, or we may look at every other letter, or
at the first letters of lines, or at the first letter of each capitalized
word, or at every letter in each capitalized word. Occurrences of the
letters "x" and "z" in a string are not a problem, as we simply ignore
them. If we come across numerals, we may use "1," "4," "5," "6," and "9"
to help spell "bacon," because in Bakish they become "e," "h," "i," "k,"
and "n." The only surprise in Leary's finding 113 instances of Bakish
"bacon" in Shakespeare is that the number is so tiny.

Some English words are automatic Bakish "bacon" generators -- they each
contain a string of letters that will count as "bacon" in Bakish. Here is
a table of such words as they occur in the works of Shakespeare (a more
complete list is also available). In the first
column is the number of times the word occurs in Shakespeare, in the
second column is the word itself in English, in the third column is the
word translated into Bakish, and in the fourth column is the string within
the Bakish word that Leary would consider the signature of Francis Bacon
(some "bacons" are forwards and some are backwards). The numbers are
taken from the Harvard Concordance, which does not include stage
directions, speech prefixes, lists of characters, and the like, so the
actual numbers of occurrences should be somewhat higher.

According to Leary's method, every time Shakespeare uses any of these
words, what he's really doing is saying, "Hi, I'm Bacon."

It is only fair to point out that Leary is careful to use facsimiles of
Shakespeare quartos and the First Folio, and I have not always done so.
It is very significant to him that the first word of dialogue in the First
Folio is the first spoken word of The Tempest: "Bote-swain" (page 215
ff.). However, he need not have bothered with the original spelling,
because under his loose rules both "Bote-swain" and "Boatswain" contain
strings that count in Bakish as "bacon." Similarly, although not all
Elizabethan spellings of "counterfeit" will work, among those that do are
"contrefaict," "contrefait," "counterfait," "counterfaite,"
"counterfeict," and "counterfeight." If anything, using original-spelling
texts should increase the odds of finding one of the 3,727,584 magic
strings.

In addition to the automatic "bacons," there are what we might call
"semi-automatics": strings that may be found as parts of two words that
frequently go together. "ISFAT," for instance, occurs whenever "is" "his"
or "this" immediatedly precedes "fat," "fatal," or "father." When
Falstaff says, "There live not three good men unhanged in England, and one
of them is fat and grows old" (1H4:2.3.130-32 [Riverside]), Leary's
method would see in the line only another Bakish "bacon." Another such
string is "JESUST": according to Leary's methods, whenever a word
beginning with a "T" follows "JESUS," the importance of the passage lies
not in any religious reference but in the occurrence of the Bakish
"bacon." One would expect that Leary's methods would provide plenty of
similar evidence that Bacon translated the New Testament, but Leary never
tests his method on anything other than Shakespeare.

This is a surprising omission on Leary's part, because in The
Cryptographic Shakespeare, citing the analysis by the Friedmans, he says
this of earlier attempts to find Baconian cryptograms in Shakespeare

. . . hundreds of books have been written on the subject. . . .
These contend that cryptograms or ciphers in the works amount to
concealed signatures of Francis Bacon, who himself had written a
work on cryptography. But these ciphers tend to cancel each other
out or are so broad as to demonstrate that almost any works were
written by Bacon. [page 92]

I determined to test Penn Leary's methods according to the standard he
himself proposed, and if it turns out that his cipher "is so broad as to
demonstrate that almost any works were written by Bacon," then it must be
rejected. I have applied his methods to works that he does not claim
Bacon (or Shakespeare) wrote. If these works may also be used to generate
Bakish "bacons," then either Bacon wrote them and hid his name in cipher,
or else their appearance has nothing to do with Francis Bacon, and is just
the predictable result of the expected occurrence of some of the 3,727,584
magic strings of characters in English that Leary counts as occurrences of
"bacon" in Bakish. I wrote a UNIX script
to search for such strings, and ran it on several texts that are available
online. Here's some of what I found (links are provided to the sources
of all texts I tested):

I began by looking at Elizabethan works and found 14 Bakish "bacons" in
Edmund Spenser's Amoretti
and Epithalamion and another 64 in The
Shepheardes Calender -- was Bacon really Spenser as well as
Shakespeare? I then applied Leary's methods to Bacon himself and found 61
Bakish "bacons" in Bacon's own Essays -- what possible
reason could Bacon have had for hiding cryptographical evidence that he
wrote something that bore his name? Following up my earlier suggestion
that the string "JESUST" would produce quite a few Bakish "bacons" in the
gospels, I searched the King James version and found 83 Bakish "bacons" in
Matthew,
38 in Mark,
44 in Luke,
and 88 in John
(of the 253 in the four gospels, 44 were instances where the name "Jesus"
was followed by a word beginning with a "T," and 209 were produced by
other strings). Clearly, if Penn Leary's method were reliable, the King
James gospels must have been written by Bacon.

I thought I could do better than Penn Leary's total of 113 for Shakespeare,
and I found 1449 Bakish "bacons" throughout the works, or 1136 more than
Leary himself found. That seems an impressive total, but the works
comprise an enormous set of strings to search through. George Puttenham's
Arte
of English Poesie is about one tenth the size of Shakespeare's works,
and searching the original-spelling text I found 192 Bakish "bacons."
Spenser's Faerie Queene
is something under a third the size of Shakespeare's works, and I found
548 Bakish "bacons" there. The 1449 for Shakespeare seems, if anything, a
little low.

But since Bacon was alive when both The Arte of English Poesie and
The Faerie Queene were written, perhaps all I had done was prove that
they indeed had also been written by Bacon. I decided to check some texts
written long before and long after Bacon could have had a hand in them.

The kind of cipher Leary uses to generate what I call Bakish "bacons"
is known as a "Caesar cipher," after Julius Caesar, who is thought to have
used a letter-substitution cipher. I decided to search the Latin text of
Caesar's Gallic
Wars, and I found 64 Bakish "bacons" (every time a word beginning
with "i" follows the word "atque" in Latin, a "bacon" appears in Bakish).
If Bacon wrote Caesar's Gallic Wars as well as the plays of Shakespeare,
it would explain why Henry VI, like Gaul, is divided into three parts.

Leaping forward many centuries, I tried the method on Longfellow's Song of
Hiawatha and found 327 Bakish "bacons." As it happens, the string
"IAWAT" in English translates into a backwards Bakish "bacon," so the
very name "Hiawatha" is another "automatic," like "boatswain" or
"counterfeit." If every instance of the name "Hiawatha" is actually an
instance of Bacon's name, does this mean we should read the poem as his
autobiography?

Edgar Rice Burroughs's more recent Tarzan
of the Apes generated a disappointingly low 135 Bakish "bacons"
(perhaps Bacon wrote the work but wasn't proud of it), but I found a whale
of a lot of them in Melville's Moby
Dick: 347.

Worried that I was biasing my search by concentrating on literary
works, I tried instead that classic of political prose, the Federalist
Papers, and found 239 Bakish "bacons." In a more recent and less
classic text, the Senate
Majority Whitewater Report, I found 396 (what did Bacon really know
about Vince Foster's death?)

Indeed, I have yet to find any substantial text in English or Latin
that will NOT produce Bakish "bacons" using Leary's methods.

Unless Penn Leary is prepared to claim that Bacon wrote everything that
ever has been and ever will be written in English (and Latin, for that
matter), the inescapable conclusion is that his method is, when judged by
his own standards, useless as a means of determining the authorship of
Shakespeare's works. The words "boatswain" and "counterfeit" (and
"Hiawatha") are not evidence for Bacon's authorship, nor are the words
"his father," "Jesus therefore," and "is sweet." Leary never rejects any
Bakish "bacon" that he finds, and his rules are so loose that one is
guaranteed to find rashers of "bacons" anywhere one looks.

What is most unfortunate about such cryptographical exercises as Leary's
is not the waste of time and energy -- it seems a pretty harmless hobby --
as what it does to one's sense of Shakespeare and Bacon. All the plays
and poems are treated as if they are without meaning or significance
(Leary continually refers to Shakespeare's words as "ciphertext") unless
someone finds the magic key that unlocks the Baconian wisdom hidden behind
all that poetry. The ideal result of Leary's methods would be to throw
out all 38 plays, the sonnets, and poems, and gaze upon the 1449 "bacons"
that may be extracted. If we accept Leary's methods, then the only thing
Shakespeare says to us (and he says it 1449 times) is "Hi, I'm Bacon"; and
Francis Bacon himself becomes little better than a dog marking its
territory.